Our Quote of the Day comes from New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, responding to criticism this week of the way Al Qaeda terrorist chief Osama bin Laden was killed:
I don’t want closure. There is no closure after tragedy.
I want memory, and justice, and revenge.
When you’re dealing with a mass murderer who bragged about incinerating thousands of Americans and planned to kill countless more, that seems like the only civilized and morally sound response.
Towards the end:
The really insane assumption behind some of the second-guessing is that killing Osama somehow makes us like Osama, as if all killing is the same.
Only fools or knaves would argue that we could fight Al Qaeda’s violence non-violently.
President Obama was prepared to take a life not only to avenge American lives already taken but to deter the same killer from taking any more. Aside from Bin Laden’s plotting, his survival and his legend were inspirations for more murder.
If stealth bombers had dropped dozens of 2,000-pound bombs and wiped out everyone, no one would have been debating whether Osama was armed. The president chose the riskiest option presented to him, but one that spared nearly all the women and children at the compound, and anyone in the vicinity.
Unlike Osama, the Navy Seals took great care not to harm civilians — they shot Bin Laden’s youngest wife in the leg and carried two young girls out of harm’s way before killing Osama.
Morally and operationally, this was counterterrorism at its finest.
We have nothing to apologize for.
Dowd is correct.
The irony this week was hearing filmmaker Michael Moore sound almost like Sean Hannity in some of the rhetoric he used in trying to shame us all.
Like Dowd, I don’t feel ashamed.
Immediately after 911 I did a school program. I stood in front of those K-6 kids and almost wept and felt such a sense of grief. I thought of the horrible world they were born into and how any of those kids could be dead — victims in a political mass murderer’s thirst to drive up a body count and play tit for tat for kids killed on his side. Those were innocents and as they learned to read just look at the horrors they would read about.
And might experience first hand.
So, no, I’m not ashamed.
Not.
One.
Iota.
I wish I could have been there with Barack Obama to shake the hand of the Navy Seal who killed bin Laden.
Once for every person who bin Laden brutally murdered.
For more blog reaction GO HERE.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.